Trustees at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art asked a New York state court on Friday to dismiss a lawsuit against them brought in late May by students, faculty and alumni claiming they had mismanaged school finances.

The dismissal motion said that the plaintiffs’ claims “have no legal or factual support.”

The Manhattan art, architecture, and engineering college granted full tuition scholarships to its entire student body for more than a century. But in April of 2013, the school announced that it would begin charging about $19,000 in tuition, beginning in fall 2014, to “prevent insolvency,” according to school officials. Read More »

Columbia University’s daily student newspaper, The Spectator, announced will switch to publishing a weekly print edition and add coverage to its website.

Steve Remich for The Wall Street Journal

A vote on Sunday to downsize the print edition of Columbia University’s student-run newspaper from weekdays to once-a-week by its Board of Trustees has led to the resignation of one of the paper’s 11 board members.

Editors at the university’s 137 year-old student-run newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, had been weighing scaling back the publication’s print schedule to shift focus to the online edition.

Trustees, who are alums of the paper, approved the move by a vote of 7 to 4 on Sunday, but not without some fireworks. Read More »

A professor from California specializing in employment law will soon take the helm of Columbia Law School, which announced its first changing of the guard in nearly a decade.

Gillian Lester, a professor of employment law and policy at University of California at Berkeley’s law school and its acting dean since last year, is heading across the coast to replace David Schizer as Columbia’s dean.

Mr. Schizer has run the elite school since 2004 when at the age of 35 the school promoted him from within its faculty ranks. Read More »

The board of trustees for St. John’s University, a private Catholic school with three New York City campuses, said Thursday that it appointed the first school president who isn’t a member of the clergy.

Conrado M. Gempesaw will succeed the Rev. Joseph L. Levesque, who is interim president, on July 1. The Rev. Levesque took over for the Rev. Donald Harrington, who resigned as president last year.

Dr. Gempesaw, who received his doctorate in agricultural economics, is provost and vice president for academic affairs at Miami University in Ohio, a public school with more than 22,000 students and 1,000 faculty members. Read More »

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at Wilborn Temple in Albany on Sunday.

AP

New York state will launch a college-education program for prisoners at 10 facilities, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday, in an effort designed to reduce recidivism rates and the overall size of the prison population.

The program will offer both associate’s and bachelor’s degrees by bringing college professors to the prisons—one in each region of the state—from educational associations that provide accredited programs.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, announced the effort at an address in Albany during the New York state Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus Weekend. Read More »

The library building at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering campus in Brooklyn.

As New York University president John Sexton begins the final two years of his tenure, he will consider issues such as student debt, the value of an NYU education and who his successor will be, he said in a recent interview.

“We care about student debt,” Mr. Sexton said. “But the more important thing for us is that when students borrow to go to school they’re getting the best education possible in return for that borrow. That makes it wise borrowing.”

In January NYU is opening the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering in downtown Brooklyn — one of the last major initiatives of Mr. Sexton’s presidency, which ends in 2016. The engineering school is NYU’s 14th school in total and will cost $40,000 per year. Read More »